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Vision 2010 meeting with American Association of Universities Presidents
Phase 0 October 16, 1994 |
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Vision 2010 meeting with American Association of Universities Presidents
Phase 0 October 16, 1994 |
Themes
Mission of the University as creating, preserving, integrating, transmitting
and applying knowledge. In fact, there is even some sense in many parts of the
institution the nature of creation of knowledge is shifting away from analysis
which has characterized most of the twentieth century to more of a creation of
the process itself, in a sense, rather than examining what is, trying to
create what has never been, drawing more upon the experience of the artist,
perhaps, than on the analytical skills of the scientist.
I've been impressed in the University level of how many intellectual assets
we leave lying on the table and don't find a way to capture, to structure, to
utilize, to accelerate our own kind of learning and organizational learning.
Students who are members of the digital age having grown up in a robust,
visual, electronic environment. They approach learning as a plug-and-play
rather than a sequential experience. It's fascinating to look at some of the
more advanced multimedia games. I think of Myst-you have eight and nine year
old children that just whip through that, and its not hand-eye coordination,
it's cerebral. It raises the issue again..whether the role of the faculty
becomes more that of a coach or a consultant or a designer, and that learning
becomes more of an active process.
Institutional structures such as the extreme departmentalization of teaching
and learning that inherently discourage faculty from considering and
experimenting with new organizational roles and scholarly practices. In an
abstract situation, there are an awful lot of faculty who are thinking the way
we are talking. When you put these same people back inside their daily
functioning context, something else comes into play. There's some sense in
which their careers are fully invested in playing the old disciplinary,
university organizing game and they give you very different answers. Or, they
react in ways that amount to different answers than they did when they were
talking in the abstract.
I've also had a sense ...that... especially with the way faculty do their own
scholarship in whatever discipline they're in they are very adaptable, they
have figured out how to use these tools as is appropriate for their
scholarship. Where we seem to have a problem is when we want to move it over
into the more institutionalized fabric of our institutions whether it is in
the classroom or in how we manage the institution.
I think we have to try to loosen up the universities so there can be some
change on the margin at all; if that can be a steady, systemic way of
changing, then the miracle of compounding means that change will occur at
least very much faster than it has in the past.
There's one big chunk of our institutions now that is going through change at
almost a crisis pace and that's our medical centers.
Is the goal a reconfiguration of disciplinary boundaries? If so, who holds the
qualitative goals that ensures the stuff that is put out is really any good?
What are the checkpoints?
Some of you have seen an interesting report published by the State Higher
Education Association. It describes a possible model of organization for the
higher education system of the future which they call the unbundled university
which, in very simplistic terms, looks like one of our institutions
deorganized into half a dozen, stand-alone, not-for-profit corporations that
sell services under contract to other parts of that group or any other group.
Technological advances such as the flat panel display which produce output of
superior quality to that from laser printers ensuring demands for new forms of
scholarly communication. As research tools become more visual, it's
conceivable that research and teaching start to merge.
Institutional management that applies productivity gains to lowering costs
rather than increasing the "menu of activities." I'd rather see us focus on
the academic side, because that's the one where we, as far as I know, never on
a significant scale, have been able to reduce any costs and still argue that
we are satisfying our faculty and our students.
Part of the issue, too, is, I think that we all know, is it's very, very rare
that technology actually just simply allows you to do what you were doing
before. It's always suspended in the capacity of enabling you to do infinite
amounts of information search around the globe; once you've got that, it costs
a lot, and it's very hard to stop anybody from using it.
Unfortunately we did not develop the pattern of allowing obsolete missions or
obsolete activities to die. It raises the question, do we need to channel or
constrain, modify somehow, this entrepreneurial, loosely coupled culture that
has made most of our institutions what we are today and made us remarkably
adaptive but perhaps in a world characterized by different resources.
Issues
1. How to cut cost and improve administrative efficiencies?
2. How to improve the teaching efficiency both in terms of quality as well
as quantity?
3. What set of conditions have to exist in technology and agreements among
countries, scholars and others to enable the flow of
scholarly communication?
4. How do we increase the speed of technology
transfer to the educational process?
5. What are the implications of other
institutions, especially in the private sector, on driving change in higher
education?
6. How do we get a university with a governing structure to
come to grips with the rapidly developing changes in scholarly communication?
7. How do we apply technology to create a new scholarly paradigm rather
than maximizing an old one?
8. Should the changing nature of graduate
education be the focus since AAU schools have tremendous impact on it and
changes there result in a new generation of faculty?
9. What institutional
changes or enablers are necessary for faculty to participate in new models
and roles of scholarly communication especially related to learning and
teaching?
10. How do we change the way budgets are structured since these play
into the hands of supporting the past way of doing things?
11. How do we gain
R&D investment by universities in new approaches rather than investment in the
old?
12. Whether one views the technology as an increasingly better, more
complex way of transmitting knowledge or whether the technology is
transforming the scholarship and the knowledge process itself?
13. What are
the implications of this technology's capability to obliterate constraints of
time and space on the organizational boundaries of the institutions?
14. What
are conceptions of education, particularly for undergraduates that have
something to do with human contact and tutelage and maturation?
15. How do we
nurture the powerful relationships at campus with professors, with
undergraduates as a continual kind of renewal process?
16. How do we respond
to the public's views about deteriorating quality and availability of
education for their children?
17. How broadly should Vision 2010 define its
charge in terms of higher education segments?
18. What role and where can a
skunk works play?
Audience
The audience should be construed very widely. Faculty, public opinion
and policy makers. To preserve the kind of complex understanding of the value
of the institutions of higher learning to the country it is critically
important to get that discussion out in the public agenda because people have
very narrowly conceived ideas about what higher education is all about right
now.
The focus should be a narrow sector, rather than the broader sector. Research
universities rather than community colleges.
Process
Must review programs already using technology such as Britain's Open
University and the National Technology University.
Should lay out assumptions in these scenarios and evaluate how many we think
are right.
Vision 2010
